Acquittal of the president in the Senate is predetermined, so lets discuss the future!

For the purposes of this thread we are going under the assumption that Trump stays in office.

Which country do you think Trump will use to interfere in our elections next China? Russia again? North Korea perhaps? He does seem to love dictators and has a "good relationship" with Kim Jong Un.

Furthermore, will future presidents be able to get foreign governments to interfere in the future with impunity? Will it become common for our elections in the US to be determined more so by other countries than actual American citizens?

Lets discuss the many implications that this decision to let Trump off the hook has for the future!

EDIT. Here's a link to all the current dictators of the world today. I thought it might help to have a list of people that Trump might call upon to help him win in 2020 and the off year elections to help him keep his power.

https://planetrulers.com/current-dictators/

I'm all for a Senate trial. It means Trump can call up witnesses Schiff and Nadler blocked because they went against the narrative they wanted to push during the hearings. If the trial embarrasses Trump then so be it, but Democrats probably won't get out of this unscratched.

Foreign interference is bad no matter which side does it, but if you don't want Democrats to look like hypocrites then you should tell them they should stop protecting illegal aliens just because it's politically to their advantages. Like I said in the other thread, they like to protect them because they know their presence in their districts result in more Representatives and electoral votes.

Doesn't matter if Trump isn't removed, he's going to go down as the worst president in history thanks to this. One of only three to be formally impeached, even Nixon had the sense to realize when he had lost and get out first.

I don't know if it matters whether or not he can get foreign governments to interfere. Between gerrymandering, vote suppression, voter purges, and the electoral college and Senate representing an insurmountable hurdle we're not likely to take power back any time soon. Best we can hope for in any case is the massive disapproval of him being enough to unseat so that we can at least stave off Republican's activist takeover of the Supreme Court (thanks to all the liberals who said that sending a message was more important than getting a Democrat in the White House, BTW).

Will foreign governments be able to meddle with impunity? Probably not. One of two things will happen. By some small miracle we'll claw the country back from Trump, start making government work again, and a large segment of Republicans will wake up and start realizing how batshit insane these last four years have been and resolve not to cross the lines that he crossed. Two is that Trump holds on and in his second term begins to drastically remake our government so that it better resembles Putin's Russia or Erdogan's Turkey. In that case he won't need election meddling anymore, he'll assert much more direct control over the voting process. Frankly, I'd argue that process of asserting direct control is already in motion and has been for a long time. Basically, we'll either create an environment that is free of meddling or we'll get dragged into one that doesn't require meddling to corrupt our voting system. But yeah, right now it looks like we're probably screwed. When he got elected I said that we had a nice democracy there for a couple hundred years and people scoffed at me. I'd rather not say I told you so, but...

Again, it's not something I'm following closely, but after the perceived Kurd betrayal, I imagine he'll be working hard to ensure AIPAC is still onside.

Off topic: The impeachment hearings are over and that thread should be unpinned. Time for new threads.

@Master_Live: Close it it. I think I will rename it to simply Impeachment thread and let it stay until Senate have had the trial.

If there is a huge delay before that happens, I will probably unpinn it before the vote there.

Thanks for the input though.

The democrats voting for impeachment doesn't make trump guilty. It just means they had a majority. You people are really foaming at the mouth.

It does make him impeached though.

He is 1000 percent impeached.

And if the Senate acquits him he can still run for reelection and will probably win. Bill Clinton was impeached and he's still pretty respected; with his influence only starting to die down in recent years over #metoo coming down on him for being a womanizer.

If nothing else, last night shows how many people didn't pay attention in school. The number of people on social media that think Pence is already president because of yesterday's vote is almost laughable.

trump is the worst president in the history of this country. And his political party is not taking their oaths seriously either. So we have to educate the public...…...the part that wants to be educated and vote that ass out of office.

Factually incorrect.

Not anymore.

Where do live, you can't be living in the United States to make the statements you made. Donald Trump has done more for this country on his own despite all the powers being used against him because he won an election. The Democrats and the media have been trying to impeach him before he was the Republican nominee. Lets see he has negotiated better trade deals for The United States, told the Europeans to pay their fair share to support NATO, opened negotiations with North Korea, got imprisoned American back from all over the planet with out having to pay airplane loads of cash to do it, rebuilt the military, defeated ISIS, Reduced taxes and restrictions to jump start the economy, criminal reform, seven million people off of food stamps, created seven million new jobs, brought back manufacturing that Obama said were lost and there was no magic wand to bring them back, Trump did. Yea go back to the good old days when politicians made deals to take care of everyone except the American citizens.

Only right-leaning media talks about those things. Everyone else talks about mean tweets, how much Hollywood hates him, Russia, and Quid Pro Quo so it's not surprising a lot of people don't know. When they couldn't hide the economy getting better any longer they either started saying that it was because of things President Obama did right before he left office or just said that a good economy only helps the rich.

Considering there were presidents that expanded slavery and used the treasury as their personal bank, your statements look dumb.

Nope. Shows he was just that much worse.

Trump is being investigated for the latter and his actions aren't doing the removal of modern forms of slavery in the US any favors.

@n64dd: "used the treasury as their personal bank, your statements"

Why would you bring that up considering the self dealung Trump is doing?

Also, what happened to your assertion that Trump should be removed if he used foreign policy for personal gain?

There hasn't been any proof that he used foreign policy for personal gain.

The fact that Pelosi is sitting on sending it to the Senate shows this was pure politics.

#TulsiCoward is trending.

Gabbard and coward aren't even close to rhyming, guys. TulsiGarbage would be a lot better

Democrats have not been trying to impeach Trump since day one, in fact we've been avoiding it. Robert Mueller was all but telling Democrats that they should attempt to impeach him over his findings, and Democrats avoided it because they didn't want to be divisive. Instead of insulting us why don't you try to actually respond to the content of the letters of impeachment? Oh yeah, that's right, because trying to blackmail a foreign government into investigating your political opponents is completely indefensible.

Trump's trade deal is basically NAFTA. It's hilarious how he railed against NAFTA for so long, and then signed a deal that looked almost exactly the same. The only thing it really changes is protection for unions and workers' wages, and if enforcement of those clauses is as weak as it was for NAFTA (which is looking to be the case) then it won't make a difference anyway. By the way, those worker protection clauses weren't in the original draft that Trump negotiated and were included at the insistence of congressional Democrats. But yeah, sure, Trump's the one who cares about workers when he has to have worker protection clauses shoehorned into his trade deals by Democrats.

Trump's cutting NATO funding at a time when Russia is becoming increasingly aggressive towards NATO-aligned countries and you see that as a win? Just shows how delusional you are, and how blind you are to how detrimental the Putin-Trump relationship is to our foreign policy. And Trump opened a dialogue with North Korea, what did he do after that? Oh right, absolutely nothing. I guess we can give him a participation trophy for trying, right?

He didn't rebuild the military, he didn't defeat ISIS. You have to be pretty delusional to think he did anything to defeat ISIS when in fact he was reducing engagement. In fact, ISIS was pretty much driven back by Kurdish militias, who Trump abandoned to Turkey's authoritarian whims.

He didn't jump start the economy, the economy has been steadily increasing since President Obama's tenure. In fact, his tax cut (which primarily benefited the rich) took millions of dollars OUT of the economy and allowed wealthy individuals to stockpile it at a time when greater spending was needed. The economy might look great from the perspective of Wall Street, but people on main street are hurting like never before, and Trump has ignored them in favor of his corporate cronies. On the wasted recovery:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/we-squandered-major-economic-recovery-harvard-professor-142245851.html

He also hasn't brought back manufacturing, in fact manufacturing is struggling and experts think the sector might be headed for recession. And kicking seven million people off food stamps isn't an accomplishment, it's just plain cruel.

So yeah, everything you think you know about Trump is wrong. Stop getting your news from a Trump propaganda outlet.

@n64dd: Lol.

@n64dd: Trump not getting removed doesn't mean he was innocent, it means Republicans had the majority in the Senate.

If Democrats had the majority in the Senate Trump wouldn't be removed either (probably).

@Master_Live: Maybe, depends on how big the majority was.

You need 67 votes to remove from office.

Exactly what was the point of holding up aid to Ukraine?

Was it to fight corruption? That's certainly a lark, considering Trump has systematically attempted to cut funding to anti-corruption programs across the world.

Furthermore, the United States Department of Defense twice certified Ukraine (during Trump's tenure as POTUS, one of those certifications occurring just months prior to Trump personally ordering the aid to be withheld) as to having taken sufficiently "substantial actions to decrease corruption, increase accountability, and sustained improved capability enabled by U.S. assistance."

Then in a call, immediately after Zelinsky brought up military aid, Trump asserts "he would like a favor though", and brings up the debunked Crowdstrike server rumor as well as stating, "there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”

So... President Trump, fearing "corruption" in Ukraine, makes U.S. aid contingent upon "reciproc[ity]" (mentioned early in the memorandum of the call) by a supposedly corrupt government, and asks for this aforementioned corrupt government to investigate the son of a prominent political opponent? That seems like a legitimate apolitical action of the President of the United States in your opinion? Absolutely none of that screams manipulating U.S. foreign policy for personal (political) gain?

Hopefully, none of these people offed themselves after they realized how impeachment actually works and who controls the Senate...

@SilentFireX: I read the transcipts of the conversation and both parties story falls in line with it.

So no, no proof. Just a political ploy to win an election.

I genuinely appreciate how much effort you put in to answering even a single question I posed.

The problem with you is you are not getting any news. You are in a Liberal bubble just getting the same news from people using the exact lines with out a journalist in the bunch. They missed the largest story in decades, were all in on the Russian hoax. You need to get out of your bubble and get some real news.

Impeachment was a huge mistake unless we could actually convict him or whatever.

If it fails, what's going to stop Trump for doing more damage.

"What are you going to do? Impeach me?"

Yeah I would argue we have had more damaging presidents; Kennedy almost led us to nuclear war and the whole Bay of Pigs thing, Johnson took us to Vietnam, Nixon was a paranoid and corrupt crook that was actually impeached, and so on.

Trump is an asshole, sure, but thus far he hasn't really done a whole lot of damage. I think we wish Trump was a terrible president (objectively speaking) so we could feel validated, but so far his biggest issue is ruining international relations and the reputation of the US, and frankly that is easily repaired. The world hated us after Bush Jr and Obama was able to undo all that ill will.

I will say, however, that we probably have the worst Republican party of all time. Spineless, party-first, career politicians that care more about staying in office and their own well being than actually serving the country and the people that put them in power.

Impeached or not Trump is still not a very good president.

I'd still say Andrew Johnson, though Trump is in the top 3 worst presidents.

We really need to reintroduce basic civics back into education.

What assumption, that he stays in office vs. being removed from office or that he is re-elected to the office. I highly doubt 2/3 of the senate will vote to remove him, 2/3 of the senate almost never agrees on anything. So that's a likely given, but I will not assume that he wins a second term. He lost the popular vote by a large margin, and won several battleground states by a slim margin.

It's really dependant on turnout. Dems need a candidate to motivate the base

@sonicare: The assumption that Trump is not removed from office by the Senate.

"Will future presidents be able to get foreign governments to interfere in the future with impunity? Will it become common for our elections in the US to be determined more so by other countries than actual American citizens?"

Well...yeah, If it's deemed as nothing more then a slap on the wrist in the worst case then what's to stop the next republican or democrat presidential candidate from utilizing the same technique to subdue a political rival and/or enhance their own position?
It would be morally wrong but if that is all then I doubt it will stop those who're willing to bend morals to get their way.

That's a safe assumption. No president has ever been removed from office. Nixon resigned, though he would likely have been impeached and removed.

Yes, the necessity for a two-thirds majority would make that very likely.